Twenty-four hours ago, I wrote here that the Warmergate scandal is also a media scandal. Chris Wood, of something called “the Canadian Journalism Project,” agrees:

The real “climategate” scandal isn’t scientific, it’s journalistic

But, in his case, the journalistic scandal is that I and a tiny proportion of fellow columnists decline to submit to the party line:

Under prominent bylines I read that the emails exposed man-made climate change as (a partial list): “the biggest fraud in history” (David Warren, the Ottawa Citizen); “one of the biggest scientific scams of our time” (Charles Adler, blog); “the biggest scientific hoax in a generation” (Lorne Gunter, National Post); and a “racket” (Mark Steyn, National Review). Peter Worthington (Sun) cites approvingly Conrad Black’s verdict that, “global warming… is not, in fact, occurring at all.”

This is, says Mr. Wood, “reckless endangerment”:

In a twist on the old legal saw, it is the equivalent of failing to shout fire in a crowded theater that is slowly filling with deadly fumes.
To pass it off as journalism is professional negligence . . . I think they chose to ignore the only value that justifies our trade at all, and conceal the truth. We used to call that dishonest reporting — a fraud on the consumer.

Oooh! With any luck, I’ll be disbarred. As it happens, the NR column he links to is nothing to do with the East Anglian revelations, but one predating them by several months, and supports Conrad Black’s assertion that global warming “is not, in fact, occurring at all,” and hasn’t been since 1997.

My column was published on July 4th last year. In November, it was revealed that Dr. Phil Jones agreed with me but, for political reasons, declined to admit it in public:

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.

Later that month, Copenhagen honcho Tim Flannery changed his tune on Aussie TV and also confirmed what I and Conrad had written:

Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.

In other words, what Chris Wood regards as Steyn and Black’s “professional negligence” has been subsequently confirmed by Dr. Jones (albeit privately) and Dr. Flannery (albeit very belatedly). We revealed the truth that Jones attempted (very successfully, thanks to the poodles of the enviro-beat) to conceal. Isn’t that what the media are meant to do? Not according to Mister J-School Ethics Bore:

Peter, Lorne, Mark and the rest of you: You betray journalism’s core product, that flint of fact beneath the fancy footwork. You’re urging people to stay in their seats while the theatre burns.
You’re hurting us. Stop.

Oh, phooey. To take up your dreary analogy, we’re staying in our seats enjoying the show while the environmental correspondents run for the exits shrieking ever more hysterically. If you want to flee in terror and roll around in the snow trying to put out imaginary flames, by all means take as long as you like, and then, when the fever passes, feel free to come back in dripping wet. But it’s a bit of a stretch to call me a liar when you’re the one insisting your pants are on fire.